March 2, 1997

By SCOTT VEALE

When Chickens
Grow Teeth
A Story From the French
of Guy de Maupassant.
Retold and illustrated
by Wendy Anderson Halperin.
Unpaged. New York:
Orchard Books. $15.95.
(Ages 5 and up)

t's a strange -- and often jarring -- experience to watch young readers brush up against life's darker side. The pull of troubling images is inescapable and deep. After all, for most of us it's the Wicked Witch of the West and not the Good Witch of the North who first leaps to mind when we hear the word ''witch.'' But when handled thoughtfully, books with gloomy or mildly disturbing contents can be powerful stimulants for a child's imagination.

So it is with ''When Chickens Grow Teeth,'' by Wendy Anderson Halperin, which despite its whimsical story and delicate texture might raise some adult eyebrows. Antoine, or Toine as he is known among the inhabitants of a small French village, is a roly-poly cafe owner who gets along with everyone except his cronelike wife, Madame Colette, who marches about grumpily and tends the chicken coop: ''With her pointed nose, stiltlike legs and cackling tongue, she seems like a chicken herself.''

Poor Toine is the proverbial henpecked husband, taunted mercilessly as a ''lazy oaf'' and a ''big tub of lard.'' After he falls off a ladder and is laid up with a bad back, Madame Colette is made even crankier by the parade of well-wishers and the prospect of Toine's prolonged bed rest. When a visitor suggests using old Toine as a nest, Madame lights up, putting five eggs under each of his elbows and making clear the consequences of an accident. ''Every egg you break means a whole day for you without a bite to eat,'' she cruelly promises.

Before long, of course, Toine is acting like a nervous father-to-be, and by the end, with his bed surrounded by bits of eggshells and a chorus of peeps, the proud Toine, as well as Madame and the villagers, has witnessed something of a miracle.

Ms. Halperin's expressive watercolors, rendered with a muted palette that suits her affectionate portrait of rural life, appear in frames of different sizes, as many as a dozen on a page. The panels often circle the text, making the link between story and pictures a bit rough to follow at first for some preschoolers. But the paintings' rich detail rewards repeated readings, as does the lively, nuanced text, which feels more reimagined than translated. The author emphasizes not so much the Frenchness of the tale as its villageness: the melange of colorful characters and their communality, as revealed in their tolerance of the ill-tempered Madame and their affection for the good-natured Toine.

Ms. Halperin, previously the illustrator of two very American tales (''Hunting the White Cow'' and ''Homeplace''), has chosen well from the work of the 19th-century French novelist and short-story writer Guy de Maupassant. In a nice flourish, the mustachioed Guy pops up Zelig-like at the cafe or at Toine's bedside, always with newspaper in hand. It seems, the author notes on the back cover, that de Maupassant ''often found ideas for his works while reading the newspaper or listening to the tales of friends.''

''Why is she always so mad?'' a child might ask of Madame Colette. It's a fair question, and the author, to her credit, does not paste on a happy face at the conclusion. Madame smiles briefly, and is happy with Toine's handiwork, but one suspects that she's more satisfied with the chickens than with her husband. In fact, it's the couple's bickering, and the helpless Toine's reluctant decision to tend the eggs (under the threat of starvation, no less!), that animate the story and deepen its charm. Madame is angry because that's the way some people are, the story suggests, and she and her husband somehow get along despite being opposites. It's human nature, in other words, and this enchanting little book will both amuse children and give them an early lesson in one of life's mysteries.

Scott Veale is an editor at the Week in Review section of The New York Times.